John Masefield’s Great War: Collected Works

by Philip Errington

  Those men had no quarrel with each other. They lie there in the mud, because man, who has conquered the Black Death and typhus and smallpox, and the yellow fever, has not conquered the war fever. And the war fever takes him in the blood and in the soul and kills him by the hundred thousand.

  When the blessed bells ring for peace, this year or next year, in man’s time if not in ours, it may be possible to remake the ways of national life more in accordance with man’s place in the universe. When that time comes, France, this country, and England, the three countries which have done the most for liberty, will have deciding voices in that remaking. They will be able to declare in what ways of freedom the men and women of the future will walk. I trust that our three great nations may be able to substitute some co-operating system of internationalism for the competing nationalism which led to the present bonfire.

  And when that time comes, I hope that one other thing may be possible. I hope that my people, the English, may, as your comrades in this war, do something or be something or become something which will atone in some measure for the wrongs we did to you in the past, and for the misunderstandings which have arisen between us since then. I’m afraid that the memory of those old wrongs may never pass, for nations, like people, do not forget their childhood. Yet I hope for the sake of the world, that it may be set aside, so that your country and mine, which have one great key to understanding, which other nations have not, the same language, may, after this time of war work like friends together, to make wars to cease upon this earth.

  [source: The War and the Future, New York: Macmillan, 1918]

  St. George and the Dragon

  A speech given in New York on St. George’s Day, April 23rd, 1918

  Friends, for a long time I did not know what to say to you in this my second speaking here. I could fill a speech with thanks and praise: thanks for the kindness and welcome which has met me up and down this land wherever I have gone, and praise for the great national effort which I have seen in so many places and felt everywhere. We, who, like you, have had to lay by our pleasant ways, and take up hard ones, and go up a bitter path to an end men cannot see, know how great your sacrifice and your effort are. But I could not thank you or praise you enough, and even if I could, the best praise and thanks are silent. If and when I return to England, I will speak your praise.

  So, casting about for a theme, I thought, that today is St. George’s Day, the day of the Patron Saint of England, and that today, in the far past, that great knight of God rode out, in the Eastern country, and killed a dragon which had been devouring women, and that Englishmen had thought that deed a holy, and most beautiful and manly thing, and had chosen St. George from among all saints to be their saint, and had taken his banner to be their banner, and called upon him, century after century, when they went into battle. For they felt that such a man lived on after death, and would surely help all holy and beautiful and manly men for ever and for ever.

  And I thought, too, that on this day, 354 years ago, the child, William Shakespeare, was born, in that old house in Stratford which so many of you have gone to see. And that on this same day, after he had done his day’s work, he passed out of this life, into that Kingdom of England which is in the kindling mind, in all its moments of beauty, and that there he, too, lives for ever, to give peace, even as St. George gives a sword, to all who call upon him.

  So, thinking these things, all the more keenly, because I am far from England, in this sweet season of April, when the apple blossom is beginning, I felt that I would talk of England. Not of any England of commerce or of history, nor of any state called England, but of that idea of England for which men are dying, as I speak, along 5,000 miles of war.

  I believe that the people of a country build up a spirit of that country, build up a soul, which never dies, but lingers about the land for ever. I believe that every manly and beautiful and generous and kindling act is eternal, and makes that soul still greater and more living, till in the land where manly and kindling souls have lived, there is everywhere about the earth, present like beauty, like inspiration, this living gift of the dead, this soul. And nations are only great when they are true to that soul. Men can only be great when they are true to the best they have imagined. And I believe that in times of stress, in national danger, in calamity, the soul behind a nation kindles and quickens and is alive and enters into men, and the men of the nation get strength and power from it.

  I believe that that great soul, made by the courage and beauty and wisdom of the millions of the race, is the god of the race, to protect it and guide it and to lead it into safety. And men turning to it in time of trouble and calamity are helped and guarded by it, and brought out of the land of Egypt by it into their pleasant heritage.

  Yet nations, like men, sometimes turn away from their true selves to follow false selves, and to serve false gods. All the old Bible is full of stories of a little nation sometimes true, sometimes false to its soul, and falling into calamity, and then being quickened and helped, and returning to the truth and coming to marvellous things, to the green pastures, where goodness and loving kindness follow men all the days of their life.

  Understanding is the only thing worthwhile in this life. Art is nothing but complete understanding of something. All writers long to understand the spirit of their race.

  Let me say now, that 25 years ago, it would have been difficult for an Englishman to speak here, about the spirit of England, and to claim that it is something of the spirit of St. George, a manly and beautiful spirit, ready to help someone weaker, and something of the spirit of Shakespeare, a just and tender spirit, fond of fun and kindness and of the rough and busy life of men. That delicate, shy, gentle, humorous and most manly soul is the soul of England. It is in Chaucer, in Shakespeare, in Dickens. It is in the old ballads and tales of Robin Hood, who stood up for the poor, and was merry walking in the green forest. It is in the little villages of the land, in the old homes, in the churches, in countless old carvings, in old bridges, in old tunes, and in the old acts of the English, a shy, gentle, humorous and most manly soul, that stood up for the poor and cared for beauty. No finer thing can be said of men than that, that they stood up for the poor and cared for beauty; that they cared to be just and wise.

  Nearly 300 years ago, the life of England suffered a rude change in seven years of civil war. The ways of life which had been settled for five generations were suddenly and completely changed. There followed a turbulent and unsettled century, during which, for reasons of party, a foreign king, and line of kings, with foreign interests, and foreign methods, came into our land.

  And at the same time, something else came into our land. Industry and adventure had long been virtues of the English; but now the two together began to create competitive commercialism. And just as competitive commercialism began, a small clique of corrupt politicians, gathered under the foreign king, and by bribery and iniquity of every kind, seized the common lands of the villages of England and enclosed them. Until then, the country folk in England had shared large tracts of land, so that, though they were poor, they still had grazing for cows and sheep and geese, and woodland for firing. Now by various acts of legal robbery these lands were taken from them, and they were reduced to an extreme poverty. They were forced into a position very like slavery. They had no possessions except their right hands. There was no St. George to stand up for them, nor any Robin Hood, except that coarse and bitter truth-teller, William Cobbett. They had the choice to be the slaves of the landowners or of the factory-owners, and the great mass of the populace ceased to have any share of what life offers. The enclosing of the commons robbed them of leisure and independence, the coming of the factories took them from the fields and the old communities, and flung them into new ones, which were allowed to grow up anyhow, without art, without thought, without faith or hope or charity, till the face of the land was blackened, and the soul of the land under a cloud.

  If you consider the thought and the voices of that time,
you can see that the soul of the land was under a cloud. The thought and the voices of that time are things divorced from the body of the people. The thought is the possession of a few leisured men. It is not the joy of a great body of men. The voices are the voices of a few men crying in the wilderness that things are evil.

  The thought of that time was the thought of Dr. Johnson’s Club, and of Joshua Reynolds’ patrons. The voices are the voices of Wm. Blake crying aloud that he would rebuild the city of God among those black Satanic mills, and of Wm. Wordsworth, who saw that poetry, which should be the delight of all, was become an unknown tongue to the multitude. And later the voices become more passionate and wilder and bitterer. They are the voices of Byron, who saw the foreign king, that royal lunatic, and his drunken but jovial son, and the bought-and-sold politicians who ran the country, for what they were, and mocked them. And the voice of Shelley, who cried to the men of England to shake themselves free, and the voice of Carlyle, who saw no hope anywhere but in the drill sergeant, and the voice of Ruskin, who saw no hope anywhere but in the coming back of St. George.

  There was only one question to those men, the-condition-of-England question. Thinking men might justly be proud of certain achievements in those years, many things were invented, many things were thought out, great books were written, and the world was charted and navigated and exploited, but there was no peace in that England for the men with souls to be saved.

  The machine worked, it did great things, men could point to its results, but the great men, the seeing men, were unanimous that England was not a merry England for rich or poor. It was still a land where there was kindness and manliness and a love of life and sport and country. But with this, there was an apathy to things which were vital and kindling. The nation was drunken, and that was looked on with apathy, the nation had ceased to care, as it once had cared, with a most noble, intense, and passionate pride, for things of beauty and of style, in life, and art and music and the means of living. And this deadness and apathy and stupidity were become even matters of pride to some. Then the nation, with all its wealth, was an ill-taught, an ill-fed and an ill-clad nation, so that in every city in the land a vast number of souls were ignorant, and a vast number of bodies had not enough to eat nor enough to put on. And the rich, who owned the wealth, had lost the old English sense of splendour of life. They watched the beggary and the drunkenness with apathy. They watched the waste and the degradation of genius without lifting a finger. One of the most delicate silversmiths of our time died of consumption as a seller of cat’s meat. One of our most delicate lyric poets died of consumption as a seller of matches in the street. Not all the efforts of all the writers of England could get a theatre for the fit and frequent playing of Shakespeare. Not all the wealth nor all the industry could reduce the paupers of England, the men and women who could not make a living, to less than a million in the year.

  So that, early in 1914, England was a troubled and yet an apathetic country, with small minorities breaking their hearts and sometimes people’s windows in an effort to bring about a change, and with a vast, powerful, unthinking selfish weight of prejudice and privilege keeping things in the old ruts and the old grooves laid down by the foreign king a century and a half before.

  And yet, with it all, there was immense virtue in the land. Work was well done. English goods were well-made. And we were not afraid to let any nation compete with us in the open market. The nations could sell their goods in our markets on equal terms. We had no quarrel with anyone. We wished to show that we had no quarrel with anyone. During the years before the war, we increased our Navy, so that no enemy should attack us with impunity, but we reduced our tiny army by some divisions, and our auxiliary army by an army corps.

  People say now that we were wrong. We may have been. At any rate, we did the generous thing, and I don’t know that the generous thing is ever wrong. And in any case, we have paid the price.

  In the first week of July, 1914, I was in an old house in Berkshire, a house built eight centuries before by the monks, as a place of rest and contemplation and beauty. I had never seen England so beautiful as then, and a little company of lovely friends was there. Rupert Brooke was one of them, and we read poems in that old haunt of beauty, and wandered on the Downs. I remember saying that the Austro-Serbian business might cause a European war, in which we might be involved, but the others did not think this likely; they laughed.

  Then came more anxious days, and then a week of terror, and then goodbye to that old life, and my old home in Berkshire was a billet for cavalry, and their chargers drank at the moat. I saw them there. And the next time I saw them they were in Gallipoli, lying in rank in the sand under Chocolate Hill, and Rupert was in his grave in Skyros.

  We were at war. We were at war with the greatest military power in the world. We had an army of about 180,000 men, scattered all over the world, to pit against an army of five or six millions of men, already concentrated. We had, suddenly, at a day’s notice, with the knife at our throats, to make an army of six or seven millions of men, and we had perhaps trained officers enough for an army of 300,000. We had to enlist, house, tent, train and officer that army. We had to buy its horses and mules, build its cars and wagons and travelling kitchens. We had to make its uniforms and straps, blankets, boots and knapsacks; and, worst of all, we had to make its weapons.

  We had the plant for making (I suppose) 50 big guns and 500 machine guns and 50,000 rifles in the year, with proportionate ammunition. Suddenly we wanted 50,000 big guns, and 500,000 machine guns and 10,000,000 rifles with unlimited ammunition, more ammunition than men could dream of, with all sorts of new kinds of ammunition, bombs, hand-grenades, aerial torpedoes, or flying pigs, flying pineapples, egg-bombs, hairbrush-bombs, Mills bombs, trench mortar bombs, such as men had never used. And those things were wanted in a desperate hurry and we had the plant for not one-fiftieth part of them, nor the workmen to use the plant when made, nor the workmen to make the plant.

  It is said that it takes one year to make the plant for the making of the modern big gun, and to train the workmen to make the countless delicate machines with which men kill each other in modern war. That was the proposition we were up against, and meanwhile, just across the water, well within earshot of our eastern counties, the enemy, like an armed burglar, was breaking into our neighbour’s house, and killing our neighbour’s children, taking his goods, abusing his women and burning the house over the victims.

  In the first eight days of the war we sent two-thirds of our little army to France (about 120,000 men all told). They marched up to take position, singing, “It’s a long, long way to Tipperary.” It was not to be a long way to those brave men, for half of them were gone within eight weeks. They were not too well-equipped with guns, nor had they many machine guns, but every man in the army was a very carefully trained rifle-shot. Against them came enemy armies numbering nearly half a million of men.

  They came into touch on August 23rd, near Mons, against odds of five or six to one. They were driven back, of course. That little line was turned and almost enveloped. There has been little fighting in this war to equal that first fighting. But one man cannot fight six men: so our army fell back, fighting desperately, in hot weather, for nine days.

  Often in that blazing weather, divisions were so footsore that they could go no farther. Then they would take position and lie down and fight. The only rest they had was when they could lie down to fight. And at night, when they got to their bleeding feet again and plodded on in the dark, a sort of refrain passed from rank to rank, “We’re the bloody rearguard, and bloody rearguards don’t eat and bloody rearguards don’t sleep, but we’re up, we’re up, we’re up the blooming spout.”

  They fell back for nine days and nights, till the enemy was at the gates of Paris, and the Allied cause seemed lost. You know how the enemy swept into Belgium and into Northern France, with his myriads of picked men, his aeroplanes and overwhelming numbers of guns. They marched singing and they came on li
ke a tide, supping up cities, Liége, Namur, Mons, Cambrai, as though they were the sea itself. They beat back everything. The French were not ready, the Belgians were only a handful, we were only a handful. And then, when they were at the gates of Paris, the miracle happened. That great army outran its supplies. It advanced so swiftly that the heavy loads of shells could not keep pace with it. Then in September, 1914, that great calm soldier Marshal Joffre wrote those words which will be remembered as long as this war is remembered: “The time has come for going back no further, but to die where you stand if you cannot advance.” Then came the battle of the Marne, and people knew that whatever happened there would be no overwhelming victory for the enemy. He was beaten and had to fall back to gather strength for another effort, and all his dreams of sudden conquest collapsed.

  But though our armies won at the Marne, it was only by miracle; and the essence of miracles is that they are not repeated. Our side was not ready for war. We were weaker than the enemy in guns, men and equipment. Our task was still to hold the line somehow, without guns, and almost without men, but by bluff and barbed wire, while guns could be forged and men trained. The enemy was ready for a second spring long before we were ready to resist him, and this second spring was not to fail, as the Marne had failed, through want of munitions.

  This second spring took place at the end of October, 1914, when we had lost about half our original army and had altogether about 100,000 men in the line, many of them drafts who had not had one month’s training. This 100,000 were outgunned and outnumbered. All are agreed that the enemy brought against that 100,000 not less than six times its strength, and the battle that followed (the first battle of Ypres) lasted for twenty-seven days and nights of continuous and bloody fighting. To this day no soldier can understand why the enemy didn’t break through. Our line was so thinly held that in many places there were no supports and no reliefs of any kind, and the men stayed in the trenches till they were killed or wounded. That little and weary army underwent a test such as no other army has had to stand. The enemy shelled our line, with a great concentration of guns, and attacked with a great concentration of men, and broke the line at Gheluvelt, near Ypres. It has been thought by some that the enemy had only to advance to crumple the whole army; and destroy the Allied Cause. And then two men (according to the story) saved the issue. Two English soldiers, named Pugh and Black, gathered up small parties of men, regimental cooks and servants, stretcher-bearers, and walking wounded, and held the enemy in check, till what was left of the Worcester Battalion, about four hundred men, could be put in to retake the village. Those four hundred men saved the line and prevented a defeat. Our generals were writing an order for retreat when a staff officer came galloping up to them, in wild excitement, and without a hat, to shout out that the Worcesters had restored the line.